September 2009

09/29/2009

Parents.com emailed me yesterday, a general email to all us bloggers not a personal response to any of my requests, to announce that our blogs will be taken off-line tonight. So I made my final decision on my 15 posts, with Nick's help, and pasted them here. I copied the comments too and pasted them all in as one comment underneath.

And now there they are on the sidebar. To the left. That's them.

That's it.

15 posts from two years of writing three times a week. Yup. Meredith Publishing still technically owns them, as well as the over 300 other ones they wouldn't allow me to bring here. That now exist nowhere.

Gone.

Poof.

Tonight they say.

I have more to say about this, obviously, but I'm tired and I'm still waiting for my final paycheck to arrive and for the so-called "special agreement" to include a mere fraction of my writing here.

So that's all for now.

The good news is this transition process is finally over and I can return to the present day. Answer Mary Elizabeth's question. Tell you about Elias and baby Olive, 29 weeks and counting...

But not tonight. Tonight I need to veg out with my good friend's Ben and Jerry.

Sweet dreams everyone.

May you all dream of a world where family stories matter more than corporate contracts...

And giving someone a way to explore their world, to understand it and record it, trumps profit, any day.

09/27/2009

Almost finished choosing my fifteen posts. Almost. I first narrowed the over 300 to 53 and now I'm whittling that pile down, chopping it to its knees, trying to squeeze it into a mere fifteen. But I got a few more petals to pull. Still waiting to hear from Parents in regards to my final pleas to keep our blogs on-line and to give us a keepsake disk that includes comments. Waiting. And October inches closer every day...

But I am here tonight because I plan on writing a post this week to address the following request from Mary Elizabeth:

"I know
you are busy rereading your files, but when you come up for air, can
you write about how you wish other mothers would talk to you about
Elias' disabilities and abilities. We have a new friend in our play
group and I don't want to stress his differences, but don't want to
ignore them either..."

I look forward to sharing my thoughts on this and would love to incorporate some of yours into my response. So please either email me or comment if you have insight for Mary Elizabeth and well, for all compassionate parents out there who want to know but aren't always sure how to ask.

For those of us who want to help our children understand but stumble over words as we don't want to ostracize or minimize.

09/22/2009

I'm about a year into my reading of my former blog at Parents, trying to choose 15 posts to republish on this site. I'm reversing time as I read, going from the most recent ones backwards and doing this as I lay in bed, with a belly bigger than it's ever been, as Olive pushes against my womb, stretching her little limbs, letting me know she's part of this process.

And she is.

Here we are in the third trimester--no surgery, no cerclage, no bed-rest, no cervix opening months too soon. And from reading old posts, I never saw this possibility. That sperm and egg would meet not in my left but in my right uterus, that two X chromosomes would combine to create the longed for girl, and that this pregnancy would progress so, for lack of a better word, normally.

I can see my longing for this outcome hidden behind the endless question marks that punctuate so many of my pastposts. A longing I didn't think I even deserved to articulate.

And there is something strangely cathartic about reading this angst from my position of 28 weeks and counting...

09/19/2009

My latest challenge: to read through two years of posts from my blog at Parents.com, and from the over 300 published, choose a mere 15 to republish here.

15 posts. That's all.

And I'm pregnant and emotional, I know, but it makes me sad that Parents won't relinquish their rights to my material and they don't plan on keeping the old posts up on their site. Just ownership for ownership sake.

Gone. Two years of work that I won't even be able to link to because they plan on taking the blogs down at the end of the month. And though I figured out how to copy and paste all my posts onto a 1,000 plus page (b/c of the size of the pictures) cumbersome word document to share with Elias someday, I'll lose all your comments.

And this too makes me sad, as blogging is beyond writing an article but about building a community of readers--readers who give back with their own words of wisdom, strength, compassion, and humor.

But a contract is a contract and I'm the one who signed it, excited about the much needed paycheck to help with our bills, honored to receive good money for writing three posts a week from the comfort of my home, on the one subject I know best: navigating this unexpected life of ours. Or following Elias wherever he leads. So its a bitter pill to swallow but I penned my name on the line.

One of my fellow bloggers from Parents, Bree former author of Parental Discretion Advised, wrote a great post about this transition on her personal site, that explains more of the details of our contracts and how it is that we do not own our words. She also gave me sound advice via email for my 15 Post Challenge: to choose the ones that would not necessarily benefit from hindsight, as I can retell any of the stories in new words, so to select those post that "perfectly encapsulate" my feelings, or where the wording seems just right.

So I have some reading ahead of me. And decisions to make.

Good thing I'm soooo level-headed right now, as I teeter on the edge of the third trimester, with buckets of tears just waiting for the smallest of signals to release.

Yeah, that and I write from the house of the recovering sick, Elias and Nick both survivors of early seasonal crud (Elias still coughing but much more energetic today)--Olive and I wavering on the brink but somehow holding onto to the strands of health that have carried us this far, farther than we've ever been.

In case you missed that earlier reference to the third trimester, I'll be 28 weeks on Monday and I'm still upright.

Can I say that again? 28 weeks and I'm still upright.

But if you don't hear from me for a bit, I'm lost in my archives-- though my guess is I'll need to resurface here for air. If you have any suggestions feel free to share.

I did send one last plea to Parents, asking them to reconsider keeping the blogs on an archive site b/c if its a decision based purely on numbers it wouldn't hurt them to get a few extra hits from time to time when us former bloggers linked to older posts.

And finally, I just want to give a shout out to the folks at CafeMom, formerly ClubMom, where this blog began, and thank them for deciding to give me the rights to my work when they ended our contracts.

Thank you for understanding the need, as a parent, for me to reclaim Elias's stories and to own my process, the missteps and leaps, of becoming his mother.

09/18/2009

Elias climbed off the bus yesterday, coughing, and not his usual loose gunky cough from his habitual upper airway congestion but a dry deep cough, the kind that scrapes away at my "all better" news.

Another sleep-deprived night for Nick and I as we inadvertently took restless shifts, worried about the creeping illness moving into his damaged lungs, both battered by the fears that arise when you lie awake in the dark of night.

09/17/2009

When Elias woke up yesterday, climbed out of our bed by himself, and said, "We want to go for a walk," I knew he was better.

I still kept him home from school but instead of spending the day snuggling he "helped" me clean the house. He loves "folding" laundry, pulling clothes out of the basket, balling them up and putting them in the designated pile. "Where's Daddy's pile?" he asks as he scrunches Nick's work shirt between his small hands, prepared to fling it to the top of the pile.

When all the laundry is folded, he gets to throw the laundry basket down the stairs to the basement. "What else can I throw?" he asks. And I look for dish towels or socks for him to throw down to be washed.

He also loves to "clean the toilet" which for him involves pumping the plunger up and down and splashing the water around the edges. Or washing dishes which means playing with the water spout in the kitchen sink.

I encourage all his attempts at cleaning because I figure its more important to foster his excitement over household chores than to harp on him for actually making them more challenging for me. So he crumples and splashes while I fold and dry in his wake.

This morning I drove him to school, he insisted. "Mommy want to drive me to kindergarten."

"No bus?" I asked.

"No, you want to drive me."

I think he knew I needed to see him walk into his classroom, with a huge smile, and to see the other kids surround him and say: "Hi Elias!" "I missed you." "Hi Elias." "Were you sick?" "Hi Elias."

(And sure, I wish Elias would have responded to their greetings instead of looking around the room but that's' me leaping beyond what matters: his classmates welcomed him home.)

"Well look who's here!" his teacher exclaimed.

"My Mommy" Elias answered, missing her point.

With little prompting, he walked to his small bench in the coat area, that sits next to his hook, underneath his name, and started to unzip his jacket. As he eased back into the morning routine of his classroom, he looked up at me and said, "Why are you here Mommy?"

So I watched from the doorway as he put his lunch bag on the cart and his folder in the box. He walked without his canes to his red table, pulled out his therapeutic chair by himself, and climbed into the supportive seat.

One of the boys from his table, rose from his own seat, walked to the back of Elias's chair and scooted him up to the edge. When the boy sat back down, he reached into the box in the center of the table and handed a green and blue crayon to Elias.

"Which one do you want?" I heard him ask.

I watched from the doorway, as he sat with his arm outstretched towards my son, willing Elias to respond-- Please baby answer him, I know you didn't say hi back to any of the kids who greeted you at the door but its quieter now, less stimulating, just four boys sitting around a table, come on, choose a crayon--and before I left I saw him reach over and take both crayons from the boy's hand.

09/15/2009

This morning when I told him I was taking him to the doctor he cried, "I want to take the stairs."

"No elevator?" I asked, confused.

"No, the stairs," he sobbed, rubbing his eyes and rolling over in bed.

Um, I think the boy's sick.

In the doctor's office he asked, "When do we get to go back home and snuggle in bed?"

"We are just waiting for the results," I told him as I held him in my lap in the hard plastic chair, "To see if you have something called H1N1. Isn't that a funny name, all letters and numbers?"

He didn't even smile.

But when the doctor returned and said, " Good news, the results came back negative," I sure did.

So Elias is just fighting off your average-seasonal-back-to-school-crud.

And though I'd much rather see him out in the back yard crawling under our deck looking for tennis balls to throw for Tonzy than sprawled across our bed, sleeping, in the middle of a sunny September afternoon in Alaska...

...it's not the dreaded influenza first introduced to us as "Swine Flu".

And before he fell asleep he actually sat up in the kitchen and ate a couple crackers. As we snuggled in bed he reached over and honked my nose.

I think he's feeling a little better.

Thank you all for your care and concern--I love having this community to share with and to hold us up.

09/14/2009

It's 1:00 a.m. and I lay on the couch with my body curled around Elias's. His rump rests on my pregnant belly, his head under my chin, my arm drapes across his side, and in this position all three of us fit. He lifts his hand to my face, branding my cheek with the heat of his fever, as if to leave a burnt fingerprint so the rest of the world will always know to whom I belong.

We are on our second load of wash and there is nothing left inside him to project. And as I lie awake listening to his even breaths my mind races from news reports of H1N1 to our 94 days in the NICU to our unexpected hospital stay in Oregon, and I wonder if illness will always arrive at our house with so many over-stuffed bags.

At 4:00 a.m. his fever finally breaks and he sleeps peacefully between Nick and I as we toss and turn besides him, pillars of concern, hoping our worry will somehow protect our child from the image of sirens racing through stoplights, doctors in scrubs, wrinkled brows.

"You want to lie back down," Elias says when I rise to relieve my squished bladder sometime after 10:00.

I touch his forehead and feel the heat of his fever returned. "I'll be right back Babe."

We spend the day in our jammies, intertwined, somewhere in the back of my mind I know I need to protect myself, and his two-pound sister, from his coughs-- and yet I can't help but to take his breath in mine as he nestles his small frame into mine.

Around noon he pulls his head from my chest, sits up and points towards my left breast, "Is your heart right there?"